Charles Bradley is going to speak his mind. Feel free to ask him whatever questions you want. He isn't going to answer so much as continue speaking as if he was never interrupted.

Perhaps the habit comes from the 64-year-old's long, solitary years on the road, working odd jobs from Alaska to Maine and singing on the side. He was working as a James Brown impersonator called Black Velvet when he was discovered by Daptone Records co-founder Gabriel Roth.

"You look back on your life, and you see all the stress and pressure and confusion," Bradley says. "But between it all is love. The more that you give of yourself, of love, the more you find out who you really are."

Bradley's been feeling the love not just of his creator, whom he praises constantly between interview questions, but also music fans and critics since the release of his debut album, "No Time for Dreaming," in 2011.

"His grainy, lived-in vocals are straight out of the James Brown/Wilson Pickett school; comfortable with both the gospel yearning of slower ballads but ready to make the leap to shouting, searing intensity without warning," writes Hal Horowitz of the website AllMusic.com.

On the record and on his most recent cross-country tour, he's backed by the Menahan Street Band, which is made up of members of The Budos Band, Sharon Jones' Dap-Kings, Antibalas and Lee Fields' Expressions, among others. The group's classic soul sound is the perfect canvas for Bradley's world-weary lamentations on love and proclamations of faith.

"This world is going up in flames, and nobody wants to take the blame. Don't tell me how to live my life, when you never felt the pain," he sings on "The World (Is Going Up in Flames)."

"You got to do that the way you feel it. If the words don't come out right, you have to make it right," Bradley says, again sounding more like a preacher than a musician who toiled in obscurity for most of his life before finding an outlet for his talents. As Bradley readily points out, though, it isn't about the fame.

"Money can't buy me what I want. It can only buy me material things," he says. "That's all it's about, is trying to make people happy."